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  • Why AIOps Is Critical for Pandemic Business Recovery

    Why AIOps Is Critical for Pandemic Business Recovery

    As businesses worked to stay afloat over the last year, innovation in many areas fell behind. Business leaders struggled to understand the short-term and long-term impact the COVID-19 pandemic would have on their business, while employees worried about losing their jobs and customers scrambled to rearrange budgets. As we near the end and can finally see light at the end of the tunnel, business leaders are looking for ways to get back on track.

    Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) is the solution many businesses need to free up resources and return their focus to innovation. The data speaks for itself—the AIOps market was valued at $13.51 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow by more than 200% to $40.51 billion over the next five years. AIOps presents several benefits to enterprises, like automating mundane tasks, providing actionable reporting and improving risk management.

    But before IT leaders jump headfirst into adopting AIOps, there’s still one common misconception they must address: AIOps isn’t a solution, it’s a long-term strategy. AIOps simply cannot be viewed as a band-aid on the road to recovery. To truly maximize the benefits and bring innovation back to the center of business focus post-pandemic, teams must view AIOps as a long-term strategic investment.

    For IT teams looking to adopt an AIOps strategy, consider these three takeaways to jumpstart the journey and maintain it in the long term.

    Find a Partner to Offer Market Insight

    On the road to recovery, IT leaders may not have the time or bandwidth to truly invest what it takes to implement a robust AIOps investment strategy—let alone where to start. But working with a trusted, experienced partner who does have the time and resources to map out a plan and who keeps a close eye on market trends can help ease any struggles that IT leaders may face.

    A strategic partner can also help teams identify what tools IT teams already have in place that will support an AIOps strategy and which will stand in the way of it. Through a comprehensive tools rationalization process, IT teams have a better grasp of what tools they have in place, which are performing overlapping capabilities (in other words, increasing unnecessary costs) and what tools they still need to support their AIOps journey.

    The right partner can plot a path forward for IT leaders and give them peace of mind knowing they have an expert in their back pocket at all times.

    Identify Use Cases

    Use cases for AIOps may have changed over the course of the last year depending on a company’s place in the market, product focus and future growth plans. But as companies bring innovation back to the forefront, they must reevaluate their use cases for AIOps. If you’re an IT leader looking to invest in AIOps, ask yourself ‘Why?’ and determine precisely how AIOps can support that end goal. Your trusted partner can help by giving a different perspective that IT leaders may not have, simply because they are in the weeds day in and day out.

    Build a Plan and Execute

    With the right tools in place and a partner by your side, it’s time to lay out your complete AIOps investment plan with actionable steps in place. Consider the use cases you determined and your short- and long-term goals for AIOps as a starting point. Remember—this isn’t a plan with a definitive endpoint, but rather a strategy with definitive milestones that can help keep the business up and running and customers happy while maximizing internal processes.

    As IT leaders look ahead, they can regain confidence and feel empowered to bring innovation back to the business. No longer should they feel like they’re drowning in incidents and constantly putting out fires. With a long-term AIOps plan in place, IT teams are equipped to thrive post-pandemic and come out on the other side stronger than ever.

  • 3 Ways to Support DevOps Teams in Remote Work

    3 Ways to Support DevOps Teams in Remote Work

    As we settle into remote work for the long haul, it’s crucial to consider how best to support DevOps teams. While DevOps employees face similar challenges working remotely as any other department, they also face increased pressure to deliver as IT professionals, supporting the entire organization through an ever-changing work environment.

    By nature, remote work makes it more difficult for your DevOps team to do their jobs. Team members are working in various environments, but also distributed across geographies. And in this new frontier, DevOps must provide service as usual, continuing their development projects and ensuring communication and alignment among departments when it comes to the organization’s technology and IT needs.

    Even more, in a distributed, remote workforce, disruptions to application performance and security issues are more likely to occur and DevOps professionals must be equipped to identify and correct them quickly. For these reasons, it’s critical that these teams have the right tools and support to remain operational, communicate effectively across departments and neutralize threats—keeping applications and the organization running.

    How to Support Remote DevOps Teams

    Remote success looks different for every DevOps team based on organization size, industry and business need. However, the following strategies can be applied universally and may even serve as building blocks on technological foundations you already have in place:

    • Continue migrating operations to the cloud. Your cloud infrastructure is the backbone of any remote support plans for DevOps teams. Migrating operations to the cloud is the biggest enabler in making sure your team is not tied to any physical location and can do their jobs without relying on a single data center or headquarters. For example, deploying your open source data infrastructure in public clouds not only makes it easier for team members to access the data but also increases developer and operational velocity, which accelerates application innovation. While most organizations are well into their migration to the cloud, it’s critical to accelerate the process to expand across more operational areas. Traditional work environments likely won’t return to fully in-office experiences. Rather, many organizations will implement a hybrid working model. Refining and expanding your cloud infrastructure will help you make that transition and continue supporting an in-office, remote or hybrid team in the future.
    • Automate security and performance monitoring. DevOps teams are under pressure to scale solutions for remote work, such as company VPNs for network access and secure application logins. They must also be alerted to and able to track any security issues that arose during the hasty transition to remote work. Automated monitoring of software performance and trends keeps teams ahead of threats and minimizes deployment issues. The software sends alerts and allows teams to view data in real-time. Even more, machine learning technology can analyze the data and identify trends about application performance, the cloud environment and data usage. This level of monitoring and analysis is only possible with automation and makes it much easier for DevOps teams to meet IT service requirements as the remote technology landscape rapidly changes.
    • Increase communication and collaboration efforts. It’s crucial that DevOps teams are in constant communication with key departments across the organization, including security and executive leadership, as well as with other employees to discuss what’s working and what needs to become a priority for change. To help support knowledge sharing across a remote team, first ensure you communicate all application metrics clearly so every member of the team understands and is aligned on projects and next steps. Dashboards can help in this arena, collecting and converting key data points into visuals. And while you can easily create and host meetings with conference calls and video conferencing software, informal face-to-face conversations are harder to re-create—and that’s where ideas are born. To combat this loss, arrange for non-structured discussions without strict agendas or topics to encourage idea sharing, creativity and inspiration among employees.

    Remote work has broken down the traditional DevOps team structure, but this new way of work provides an opportunity to build something better—more time for independent, focused work, a superior work-life balance and modern cloud-based solutions for daily tasks. Supporting DevOps teams as they grapple with the new pressures of remote work is the key to ensuring your organization runs smoothly during the transition—cloud infrastructure, automation and communication are just a few of the strategies to do so. 

  • Governance, Quality Critical in the New Digital Norm

    Governance, Quality Critical in the New Digital Norm

    The shift to digital is certainly not new. But the speed of digital adoption has been accelerated as organizations react to the COVID-19 pandemic and implement remote working and contactless or self-service channels for customers. What’s more, the evidence shows that trend is here to stay.

    Analyst Gartner’s CIO Agenda 2021 report shows that 76% of CIOs reported increased demand for new digital products and services as a result of the pandemic. But far from being a temporary spike, 83% of CIOs said they expect that to increase further in 2021. There was also a 65% increase in the use of self-service by customers during the crisis, and 79% of CIOs expect that figure to grow next year, too.

    These trends all put increasing pressure on DevOps teams to drive continuous improvement and development of products. Some 83% of developers say they are releasing code faster and more often than ever before, according to the “2019 State of DevOps Report.”

    But with the pressure to develop faster, there is a battle to find the right balance between speed and quality. Move the needle too far toward either end of that spectrum and the results can be equally disastrous for the business.

    In Digital, Quality Matters

    Rushing releases and updates out too quickly can lead to poor quality or defective code. If this impacts the user experience, it can have a significant impact on adoption and ratings. A report on commercial and retail app testing by Testlio, for example, shows that 50% of users won’t download an application with a three-star rating from an app store. And that rises to 85% for an application with just a two-star rating.

    In the second annual OverOps DevOps survey, over half of respondents said they encounter critical or customer-impacting issues in production at least one or more times a week. And more than 40% of critical production issues are first reported by end users or customers rather than by internal monitoring and alerting tools.

    But 45% of developers in the same study said they are under pressure to move fast, which doesn’t give them enough time to ensure the quality of the code they are producing.

    Manual Bottlenecks

    While DevOps has tools to develop, test, ship and containerize software, there is often a lack of governance and orchestration. This makes it difficult to get that balance between speed and quality.

    The major challenge for DevOps is the time-consuming and manual nature of testing and QA, which causes new releases and updates to be either delayed or of poor quality. The testing life cycle remains highly manual and updates must be tested across all devices, platforms and networks.

    More than half (55%) of respondents to Kobiton’s “State of Test Automation” survey for 2020-2021 said automating testing would improve software quality. Yet just over three-quarters (76%) said they still conduct most of their testing manually.

    And it is this lack of automation and orchestration that is really holding back DevOps efforts in many organizations today. In a survey by research analyst Forrester, “Face the Workflow Automation Gap Head On,” two-thirds (67%) of IT leaders said the lack of application workflow orchestration leads to services not being completed in time and 55% admit that it takes valuable time away from strategic initiatives.

    Managing the DevOps Workflow

    The key to ensuring better governance and quality in DevOps and overcoming the manual effort and time pressure is to integrate automated workflow orchestration into the software development lifecycle process.

    This orchestration enables DevOps teams to test early and often, and ensure new releases and updates are ready to go to a live production environment.

    For example, modern workload automation tools allow IT ops teams to easily standardize processes in development, test and deployment with the help of built-in wizards and templates. And rollback capabilities and automated process documentation take much of the pain out of managing DevOps processes. Workload automation also provides greater coordination with highly configurable automation that only runs processes when a certain set of conditions is met.

    Ultimately, this helps DevOps teams automate and streamline the QA and testing processes so changes are carried over into the production environment without developers having to manually transfer new code from the testing environment.

    And that means DevOps teams can automatically enforce governance and standards and maintain that essential balance between speed and quality in today’s digital norm.

  • What Children Can Teach Us About Coding

    What Children Can Teach Us About Coding

    Redgate’s Code Club for kids ended up teaching their parents to love coding again

    Like lots of people in IT and other office-based jobs, I’ve been working from home since the pandemic started to hit in March 2020. In some ways it’s been hard because I’m the technical lead on a software engineering team, and continuing to work in an agile, collaborative way can be difficult via Zoom. In other ways, it’s been interesting because we’ve demonstrated it can work, often remarkably well.

    But I’m not just a technical lead, I’m also a father. And for my 8-year-old son, Dougie, things have been tougher. Here in the UK, schools were forced to close for a long time and one of the things he really missed was the lunchtime Code Club classes he’d been taking. Run by teachers, parents and volunteers and supported by Code Club UK, part of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Code Club is a great initiative to help children to code with a range of really well-planned and thought-out projects.

    So naturally, being a software engineer myself, I thought, How hard would it be to organize an online code club for the children of people at Redgate Software? I mentioned it to a few people at work and when someone suggested maybe we should see if parents beyond Redgate would be interested, I thought, No problem at all. Redgate has quite a few followers on Twitter, so we put out a tweet.

    What could possibly go wrong?

    Panic Stations

    What started as an idea to help maybe 10 or so children of the people at Redgate went crazy. By the next morning we had 1,000 sign-ups from kids from all over the world. Not just the U.S. and Europe, but India, Nigeria and Sri Lanka as well. And the sign-ups kept coming in by the hundreds.

    Fortunately, the Raspberry Pi Foundation had already done a lot of the hard work for us by creating a series of Code Club class projects for beginners, intermediate and more advanced coders. They were delighted at our suggestion of using them in our online classes, and recording them so that they could be watched later as well.

    Redgate also actively encourages staff to give back to the community and when I gave a shout-out for volunteers to help run the classes, there was a huge response with 50 people raising their hands. Within a couple of weeks, we had the sessions planned, with the beginner and intermediate ones using Scratch and a more advanced session learning Python.

    There was quite a lot of safeguarding we had to think about as well around talking to other people’s children over Zoom, and we had conversations with the director of Code Club UK and her team to get their input. We wanted to make sure people weren’t sharing their videos and sound and that kind of stuff, but we managed to work our way through it and ensure we were protecting children while sharing some really cool stuff with them.

    All Systems Go

    On Friday, April 3, Redgate’s Kids Coding Club opened its doors online to hundreds of children aged between 6 and 14, as well as their parents. I wanted the kids themselves to run the sessions for other kids, so they were the presenters and their parents were co-presenters. In the sessions hosted by my son Dougie, he would talk about what we were going to do in the session and explain what things like sprites are. We then worked through the module as a group and if anyone got stuck, they could raise their hands virtually using the Zoom tool and a volunteer would step in to help.

    We ended up running six coding club sessions every Friday for 17 weeks while schools were closed. During that time, we taught nearly 800 children from 20 countries how to code, delivered 1,572 hours of learning, and recordings of the classes on YouTube have racked up thousands more views.

    What We Learned

    What I love about the coding club is that while we were delivering learning, we were learning, too. There were three big lessons for me.

    Children love to code

    A lot of people think children just want to sit down and play Minecraft or Fortnite, but if you give them the right tools, they absolutely love coding. Scratch, for example, is a block-based visual programming language that’s really easy for children to pick up and start coding with, particularly when you give them fun stuff to do.

    Sixty percent of the children we taught were between the ages of 6 and 8 and they loved using Scratch on projects such as Rock Band, Cats, Clone Wars and Boat Race. They coded their own musical instruments, stopped cats falling into holes, saved the Earth from space monsters and navigated a boat to an island. What’s not to love?

    Parents love coding, too

    Around 40% of the kids who signed up had parents who had never done any programming either, so they were both starting together in front of the computer, which was great. Typical feedback from the parents was that they were surprised that beginning to code isn’t hard, it’s really fun. A lot of them sat with their children for an hour after the lesson and continued to just play about with things and change stuff.

    Children can help us be better at coding

    There’s this preconception with coding that you have to get it exactly right for it to work, but what’s great about Scratch and other tools is how much freedom the kids had to change the project they were working on. They’d rather use a parrot than a polar bear. They didn’t want it to jump 10 pixels high, but a hundred pixels high. What happened if they asked it to jump minus 10 pixels? They could just poke the thing and play with it, and it was fun to see the little light bulbs going on in the face of the kids—and their parents.

    That can teach us about coding, too, because we often go down tramlines and do things the same way, every time, even when we say we’re taking a test-driven development approach to coding. Teaching children how to code was a nice reminder that we should be thinking more like them, poking and pushing things to the limit and doing the unexpected. We’ll end up with better code, and we’ll have more fun, too.

  • Building (and Nurturing) a Product Team During a Pandemic

    Building (and Nurturing) a Product Team During a Pandemic

    Building a successful product team is difficult under the best of circumstances. Building one during a pandemic raises the level of difficulty by an order of magnitude. But it’s not impossible.

    In early 2020, everything changed. For months now we’ve been scrambling, adapting to a new normal that none of us had the foresight to plan contingencies for. We’ve moved from a world of in-person collaboration to one that relies heavily on technology to keep the proverbial wheels turning.

    The shift to an at-home workforce has brought with it the productivity you might expect when you strip away lengthy commutes and other inefficiencies. We’re left with an operation that’s run lean, on the back of technological solutions that push deliverables out the door in a matter of weeks, not months.

    Traits of a Team That Can Weather the Storm

    Now that digital transformation is no longer optional, a digital-first product team isn’t either. These digital natives were nice to have before, but in a world driven by Zoom meetings, Slack and Google Docs, they’re essential. Entire operations, quite literally, could fall apart without them. Without a doubt, a good product team starts with a good leader, and that leader these days needs a firm grasp on the tech challenges faced by their teams and the solutions that keep every part of the business moving in times of uncertainty.

    But it’s not just technology. The DNA of the perfect product person starts with curiosity, an ability to poke and prod and find inefficiencies by asking the right questions and always seeking a better solution.

    They should also have a growth mindset. An effective product person is always pushing the limits. It’s this ambition, this desire to keep moving forward regardless of the current situation, that often moves an entire team to keep up or risk getting left behind.

    They aren’t followers. The ideal product person is willing to argue against a decision that the rest of the room agrees with. They stand their ground and explain their thinking in a way that’s productive and respectful. They might not be the typical extrovert, the person always willing to step up and lead, but when they speak up, their words have purpose. These types don’t follow orders blindly; they question them, looking not only at the task but also the desired outcome, in an effort to find a better way. “Because we’ve always done it that way” falls on deaf ears, as these types understand that what brings you success rarely keeps you on top without the ability to adapt and evolve.

    The Collective Consciousness Inherent to a Product Team

    It’s important to zoom out and remember that a great product team is about more than a group of individuals. When done right, it’s a collective that moves as one. Individual achievements become all but meaningless and the focus is always on the team.

    This really boils down to culture. While a product leader chooses the shared beliefs, ideas, attitudes and knowledge that make up the team’s identity and work ethic, it is only the team that can internalize this collective consciousness and make the desired culture a reality. This is why one person can so easily make or break a team, so ensuring a good culture fit becomes the gel that holds the entire thing together.

    For the most part, product teams need individuals that are team-oriented, individuals that care about propelling the team forward rather than just achieving individual goals. Understanding is everything, and an empathetic individual understands not only their own struggles but the challenges faced by those around them. The importance of these individuals cannot be overstated, not only for the culture of the team but that of the company as well.

    Last, but not least, we look for people who make good decisions. This doesn’t mean they always make the correct decision. They are human, after all, but they are decisive in their decision-making and willing to take responsibility for decisions that go wrong. We don’t typically see the results of these decisions right away. Often, they play out several months, or even years, down the line. But we have to know that the person making these decisions is capable of weighing all the options, seeing all the angles and being decisive when called upon. This is particularly true at the senior level, the driving force of the team’s decision-making capabilities.

    Culture starts from within, and though teams are of the utmost importance, they are composed of individuals. If we were to build a product team in 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, we could do worse than identifying these characteristics in each member. One individual could propel the team to new heights or serve as a speed bump on the road to success.

  • Engaging Developers in a Post-COVID-19 World

    Engaging Developers in a Post-COVID-19 World

    The time for platforms to rethink how they engage developers is now

    How we communicate, socialize, look up information, work, shop and travel have all been transformed by platform companies. COVID-19 has only increased our reliance on these platforms, as people spend more time on the internet and businesses migrate from offline to online offerings.

    These shifts present challenges to the platforms themselves. With people increasingly using low-latency applications such as teleconferencing and video streaming, there’s much more demand for data to be delivered without noticeable delays. As more and more varied businesses migrate their services online, it creates additional burdens on platform infrastructure and stretches the limits of their functionality.

    It’s a challenging environment for platform companies. But disruption also presents opportunities. The question becomes, “What do platform companies need to do to remain relevant and to improve their products and services?“

    The Importance of Developers

    There are some obvious starting points. Platform companies will need to rapidly adapt their offerings according to their evolving user base. They’ll also need to plan for commercial sustainability and make sure that they balance short-term expenditure with longer-term profitability.

    But they will not be able to do these things alone. With almost 24 million developers in the world today, external developers are central to any platform’s effort to adapt their products and expand commercial sustainability. As the technology industry continues to be subject to disruption, the developer ecosystem is ideally placed to drive expansion at a sustainable scale, enable product differentiation, reduce time-to-market and ensure relevance through product-driven growth.

    Those platforms that can successfully engage developers will stand out from the crowd and win the increasingly competitive fight for developer loyalty. Similarly, as developer ecosystems increasingly become a key differentiator, the platforms that fail to engage developers may also fail to keep up with the rapidly changing technology landscape.

    Developing Developer Partnerships

    It’s clear that platforms will need to make engaging developers a priority moving forward. The question is, how?

    For a start, organizations need to have a clear sense of which parts of their ecosystem can be opened up quickly and which integrations need to be built into the platform. With these established, the next step is to engage the developers that are best placed to help.

    At the core of engaging developers successfully is the recognition that different developers will have different priorities, needs and core skillsets. All developers need to secure ROI by engaging with the platform and its ecosystem. But their perception of value will differ. Enterprise developers, for example, rate ease of use, peer perception, strong developer tools, accurate content and enterprise-level support. Independent software vendors (ISVs), however, care most about revenue, lead generation and being pulled into deals.

    Segmentation, Segmentation, Segmentation

    Investing in areas that will attract the right developers is key to long-term sustainability. And there are a few key areas that will require especially close attention. First and foremost, developer segmentation will be absolutely vital for every platform. As the product landscape expands, platforms need to be clear which new developers may want to engage with their platform.

    By revisiting developer segmentation, new product use-cases can be included to ensure that content, support and messaging match what developers need. For example, if low-code/no-code developers are a new demographic, platforms need to extend content the scope of their help materials to include more basic explanations (including generic technology terms) and extra links to FAQs.

    On the other end, platforms also will need to invest in tools that match the needs of different developer groups. Experienced, full-stack developers using the latest languages and patterns will expect sophisticated tooling, services and frameworks as well as DevOps tools.

    Either way, continued focus on self-service will ensure cost-effectiveness by allowing platforms to manage extra usage without the need to apply extra resources.

    Scaling New Heights With the Cloud

    If transitioning critical services to the cloud isn’t already on the agenda for every platform business, it should be. A seamless service transition to cloud, with future-proofed expansion capabilities, is imperative for any platform that wants to engage developers. Why? Because as well as supporting service-based pricing, transitioning to the cloud facilitates scale and allows developers to access the platform securely from any location. Above anything else, a robust cloud infrastructure makes platforms more flexible, facilitates collaboration between platforms and developers and enhances the platform’s overall performance.

    Thriving With Developers in a Post-COVID World

    The time for platforms to rethink how they engage developers is now. Building a developer ecosystem will be vital for any platform wanting to scale at speed. If equipped with powerful tools, enabled through self-service and supported through effective educational resources, developers can be the difference between platforms that struggle in a post-COVID-19 world and those that thrive.

  • Preparing for Digital Life After COVID-19 

    Preparing for Digital Life After COVID-19 

    The shift to a digitally dependent remote workforce across numerous industries was instantaneous for organizations after the COVID-19 pandemic spread, and after months of adapting, this way of life has become “a new normal.” IT professionals are facing unprecedented pressure to meet the increased demands they are experiencing now and preparing for the changes that will continue after the pandemic, such as enabling remote employees and driving the business. This presents an immense opportunity for these professionals to make a change.

    In recent months, limits to digital transformation and what organizations are capable of have been tested and surpassed. IT professionals have searched for tools, visibility and insights to help them manage the new challenges so the technology being used by organizations continues to perform well. This means expectations moving forward have been set even higher for the level of performance these professionals provide. If limits can be exceeded and issues solved as they arise, what does this mean post-COVID-19?

    Agents of Transformation

    We call the professionals who are navigating these digital changes and inspiring innovation Agents of Transformation. As the leaders of the IT industry, these technologists are identifying what tools are needed not only for their efforts, but also for the organizations they support to provide a tighter interlock between IT and business leaders. Our recent special COVID-19 research report showed how the pandemic has changed the industry long-term.

    According to the report, 79% of the 1,000 IT professionals we surveyed believe the pandemic will separate the strong from the weak in tech teams worldwide. Even if organizations find themselves surviving the digital transformation changes they’re making during the pandemic, it is crucial they also plan for the future so they do not fall behind with any additional new curveballs. As documented in the chart below, the key areas these Agents of Transformation think will change in business practices are risk and disaster planning, the continued use of remote working tools and flexible resourcing.

    Planning for Changes in Business Practices

    COVID-19 brought a lot of unexpected challenges that forced organization leaders to adapt. It is crucial organizations determine what their plans are moving forward and how they will be implemented. Once organizations know what their ideal digital journey looks like, they can begin to fill in the missing pieces such as how it could be impacted by outside forces like COVID-19 and how they can navigate these changes. Digital transformation will continue to play a key role in a post-COVID world with potential challenges including:

    •       Delivering positive experiences at an increased capacity.
    •       Lack of visibility into the performance of technologies.
    •       Managing mean time to repair (MTTR).

    Continued Use of Remote Working Tools and Technologies

    Even as health risks decrease and more employees are allowed to return to work, survey respondents expect tools and technologies for remote working are here to stay. To be successful moving forward in a world now dependent on digital transformation, organizations should figure out what their digital needs are, whether to efficiently manage increased traffic on their applications or support space for storing the influx of data. It is also important that an organization’s plans for a digital journey focus on things such as collaboration, clear goals and objectives and autonomy.

    Keeping the above in mind, one way to prepare for shifting digital goals is by embracing risk and experimentation. Applying scalable cloud instances alongside microservices allows IT teams to quickly test agile new features with a small group of users, then scale out as needed. The future is uncertain, but with digital transformation continuing to grow, organizations should use this time to push new features for their applications that can address current and potential future bottlenecks. For example, if an organization noticed COVID-19 led to larger issues in their applications, they could use this time to research and try new tools that can address the smaller challenges, allowing for more time to focus on tackling the prominent challenges.

    Jump-starting Your Digital Today

    Organizations can jumpstart their digital transformation by adopting tools such as cloud monitoring, microservices and application performance management (APM). By identifying and preventing issues before the end user experience is diminished, organizations can reduce customer support issues and ensure continued brand loyalty.

    Tools such as APM can accurately monitor and manage application technology stacks, from the user experience to network performance. These tools can help address surges in demand or shifts in resource allocations, especially as user behaviors change throughout the pandemic. While IT professionals often struggle to manage and scale services, it is possible to do this without sacrificing the user experience.

    Cloud monitoring can help organizations prepare for traffic surges during and after the pandemic, through scalable cloud instances that offer additional capacity for IT resources. Many on-premises resources that are bound to offices or other physical locations are currently underutilized due to remote work. As a result, 74% of technologists surveyed said that digital transformation projects which would normally take more than a year to be approved are now moving forward within a matter of weeks. To keep up with this growing adoption, cloud monitoring provides IT professionals with real-time visibility and insights. Implementing microservices can also support organizations to develop, test and deploy new features at an extraordinary rate, resulting in improvements in security, speed and productivity.

    Now that these changes are more familiar to end users, expectations will remain high moving forward. The organizations that successfully tackle challenges during the pandemic will be far more resilient. Internal processes have been a longtime barrier for companies to transform. Our current situation has broken down some old barriers and allowed for rapid changes in styles of work, which is likely to continue in some fashion post-pandemic. Businesses will see the value and become less risk-averse, empowering their IT teams to push the envelope for their ongoing transformations.

    Whether it is through utilizing tools such as APM, cloud monitoring and microservices, disaster planning or managing the complexity of cloud and on-premises assets, technologists have never had a bigger opportunity to lead their businesses through change or bring closer alignment of IT to the business.

  • What To Expect at a Virtual DevOps World 2020

    What To Expect at a Virtual DevOps World 2020

    DevOps World is coming soon and this means you can look forward to plenty of opportunities to learn about all things DevOps, network with like-minded professionals, attend in-depth training courses and technical workshops and just generally have some fun.

    DevOps World 2020 will have all those things. But, with the pandemic still impacting society, this year’s conference will be different. It will be held virtually Sept. 22-24, with all sessions and activities free of charge.

    The conference, hosted as usual by CloudBees, will bring all the elements of the world’s biggest and best DevOps-focused event to the people themselves—making it all available with a few clicks of the mouse. We have created a tremendous array of content and added new technological features that will enable attendees to interact virtually like you are really there.

    Here is a brief rundown of what to expect at DevOps World 2020.

    DevOps World 2020: Transforming the Future of Software Delivery

    The pandemic has spurred companies across the world to embrace a whole new way of working. It has taken people outside their office environments and placed them into new situations where the lines between work and home start to blur. This has disrupted our work patterns, but at the same time has given people a chance to gain a new perspective.

    During DevOps World, we’ll be exploring what people’s worlds are like now—and how DevOps is transforming the world of software delivery. We’ll host sessions that focus on how businesses are adapting their ways of thinking during the pandemic. They’ll talk about how they’re using new technologies, changing processes, adjusting timelines and engaging in new ways with employees, customers and business partners. Software is driving change in today’s world, and we’ll be discussing how DevOps done well can lead the way into the future.

    Interaction

    Conferences, of course, are great places to engage in impromptu meetups, establish new contacts and just enjoy the benefits of an upbeat gathering. The pandemic has put in-person events on hold for 2020, but we’ve come up with a lot of fun ways to interact virtually. Attendees can use new chat features installed to interact not only during Q&As with the speakers but also for random meetups with other attendees. We even have virtual expo booths where you can interact via live video and chat with DevOps experts from companies around the globe. The one we’re especially looking forward to is a new “speed meeting,” during which attendees can be paired with another attendee randomly for a 30-second video chat.

    Keynotes

    DevOps World has always been known for its vibrant and thought-provoking set of keynote speakers. This year’s conference will push the envelope once again with nine industry leaders presenting talks focusing on where DevOps is now, where it’s headed and how the audience can best leverage advanced practices to succeed in the future.

    Speakers include:

    • Mitch Ashley, CEO of Accelerated Strategies Group.
    • James Governor, co-founder of Redmonk.
    • Dr. Ann Marie Imafidon, co-founder and CEO of Stemettes.
    • Marky Jackson, director of open Source and CDF community ambassador, OpsMx.
    • Tracy Ragan, CEO of DeployHub and CDF governing board member.
    • Jacqueline Salinas, director of ecosystem and community development at the CD Foundation.

    I will offer perspectives on industry trends alongside two other CloudBees executives, CEO Sacha Labourey and SVP and GM of SDM Shawn Ahmed.

    Breakout Sessions

    There will be more than 100 business and technical breakout sessions hosted by a wide cross-section of DevOps rock stars including:

    • “Data-Driven DevOps: The Key to Improving Speed & Scale,” by Jenkins founder Kohsuke Kawaguchi.
    • “Automated Testing as a Part of Pipelines,” by IBM’s Rosalind Radcliffe.
    • “Chaos Engineering the Chaos Engineers,” by Gremlin’s Jason Yee.
    • “eBay’s Journey Building CI at Scale,” by eBay’s Ravi Kiran Rao Bukka and Vasumathy Seenuvasan.
    • “Bad Code Kills: Five Essential Quality Gates You Need in Your CloudBees Core Pipeline,” by OverOps’ Eric Mizell.

    Training and Certification

    As a reward for participation in the sessions and engagement with the sponsors, DevOps World participants will have the chance to receive a free certification voucher, which can be used for CloudBees 2, Certified Jenkins Engineer or CloudBees Certified Jenkins Engineer certifications. More information about these certifications can be found on CloudBees.com.

    In addition, the conference will hold a series of post-show workshop sessions Friday, Sept. 25. The following sessions will be offered: CloudBees CI Workshop – Manage Continuous Integration at Scale, Getting Started with Jenkins Configuration as Code, CloudBees CI Workshop – A Developer Centric Experience, Free Tools for Evaluating Open Source Dependencies and Risk, Hands-On Workshop: Getting Starting With Feature Flags and Measuring and Projecting the Business Impact of DevOps: A Hands-On Workshop.

    The Fun Part

    This year’s DevOps World will have a virtual fun element to it. We are running a social media campaign with the hashtag “#ShowUsYourWorld.” Over the last few months, our offices and homes have blended together into a truly organic work-life balance and we want to see what the attendees’ world looks like: How you’ve adapted, what you’ve learned, what obstacles you’ve overcome, how your priorities have shifted. Our aim is to celebrate the global DevOps community by giving individuals the chance to share their stories with us. Another fun thing that we’ll be doing during the conference is a 5k run competition tracked via a fitness app, with prizes going toward charity donations.

    DevOps World 2020

    DevOps World has set the standard as the premier DevOps event on the calendar. While this year’s edition won’t gather all 15,000 attendees under one roof, it’ll still promise to do what it always does: exceed expectations. To ensure your free spot at DevOps World 2020, register today!

  • Surveys Show COVID-19 Changes to Enterprises Likely Long-Term

    Surveys Show COVID-19 Changes to Enterprises Likely Long-Term

    The global response by organizations to the novel coronavirus pandemic has been transformational. A recent survey of more than 500 senior decision-makers in the UK revealed just how much the virus forced enterprises to innovate.

    The independent survey, funded by London-based tech developer Studio Graphene, questioned about more than 500 decision-makers within UK enterprises. Since March, 50% of those surveyed said they adopted technologies that they were previously hesitant to deploy.

    Further, 64% said the pandemic proved to be a catalyst for the digitization of their business much more quickly than they would otherwise have. While 47% report to have migrated their offering from face-to-face to online and 39% have invested in a new area of technology that they had never used before. Finally, 22% have launched a new app.

    The pandemic proved to be an eye-opener, too. The survey found that 48% of decision-makers attribute COVID-19 to their enterprise organization’s greater awareness of how technologically outdated their business is. Forty-five percent believe that it was risk-aversion that made it previously difficult to innovate. Not surprisingly, half of those surveyed said that the pandemic incentivized their company to improve their digital infrastructure.

    While 45% of enterprises said that the pandemic was a catalyst for their enterprise organization’s most radical digital transformation and 47% said that the migrated their offering online, only 39% have invested in a new technological area and 22% launched a new app.

    These findings echo the conclusions from another recent report released from Lux Research. According to Lux’s report, “The Impact of COVID-19 on Tech Innovation,” the changes brought on by the pandemic will be felt for years to come.

    Lux identified five key areas that will continue to shape technology investments beyond the pandemic. These include human “infection prevention,” remote commerce, improved resiliency, increased agility and ongoing macroeconomic impacts.

    Lux says the transformation underway will be felt differently across vertical markets. For instance, increased agility and resilience will bring long-term positive change for materials innovation. “Materials informatics will also see a medium-term positive impact thanks to increased efficiency and agility in R&D. We expect a positive effect on plastic waste recycling and synthetic biology, as more people are gravitating to single-use plastics to stay safe, and synbio can allow more agile and flexible production,” said Michael Holman, vice president of research at Lux Research.

    While the energy industry will undergo essential changes, Lux predicts that increased resilience and agility will drive further investments in clean energy that will further spur on the energy transition. “Digital transformation will [also] rapidly accelerate adoption of emerging technologies like telemedicine, thanks to a dramatic increase in remote commerce and the need for infection prevention,” said Dr. Kevin See, vice president of research at Lux Research.

    Expect increased adoption of wearables, robotics, agrifood and health systems, and long-term adoption of autonomous vehicles, the researchers conclude.

  • Survey Shows Most IT Teams Adapting in New COVID-19 Normal

    Survey Shows Most IT Teams Adapting in New COVID-19 Normal

    A survey of 122 IT professionals published today by SolarWinds in advance of IT Pro Day next week, finds that while IT teams are enjoying greater respect within their organizations in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly a third (31%) admit there’s a need to rethink internal processes to better accommodate rapid change.

    Overall, nearly two-thirds (64%) of respondents said despite contending with challenges such as reduced budgets, greater decision-making responsibilities and longer hours, they were instilled with a new sense of confidence in the wake of the pandemic. Just under half (46%) also said they feel empowered to bring more ideas to the table, while 58% said they now feel more prepared to succeed in similar unexpected situations. Another 29% reported feeling prepared to manage change but require additional resources, training and support. In addition, 40% said they believe they will now be involved in more business-level meetings.

    Patrick Hubbard, head geek at SolarWinds, said in the wake of the pandemic it’s clear the historic divide between IT and the rest of the business has narrowed considerably. The challenge will be maintaining that closer alignment in the era of the new normal, added Hubbard.

    In general, IT teams have proven themselves to be more adaptable than might have been anticipated prior to the pandemic. Many respondents also reported working longer hours due to stretched teams (29%), more responsibility (28%) and decision-making requirements (28%). However, only 22% of respondents said they were experiencing job-related stress.

    However, it’s also clear organizations will need to revisit their IT strategies as workers continue to work from home well into 2021. It’s also clear that while many employees will eventually return to the office, many of them will also be working from home more frequently. As such, the need to create digital workflows spanning a highly distributed workforce will require new approaches to networking and security, among other things.

    Just over a quarter of IT professionals (26%) said it was necessary to learn new skills to support their organizations’ transitions to a remote workforce. However, it would appear additional training is required. Systems management (55%), network management (50%), security policy and compliance (43%) and hybrid IT monitoring/management tools and metrics (28%) were identified as the top skills in need of development. Nearly half of respondents said they received the training they needed to learn these new skills, but (25%) said they are still waiting for training resources to be made available.

    That skills shortage may prove to be especially crucial when it comes to security, which Hubbard noted is usually the last thing to get funded. In the rush to enable remote networking, for example, many organizations did not pay much attention to the need to secure endpoints that were frequently accessing cloud applications, which aren’t protected by a corporate firewall.

    It’s still not clear to what degree the pandemic may drive more organizations to adopt best DevOps practices to enable IT teams to become more flexible. However, it’s apparent to all that when it comes to IT in post-COVID-19 era, there has never been a greater need for speed.